In last four years, I heard a lot about Mushroom Rock (popular by the name Santro Rock among our super seniors) but never got a chance to visit the same. Today we (Me, Sachin, Alok, Pankaj, Kapil B, Atul, Abhinav Paro) decided to visit Mushroom Rock. It is located near Games Village for World Military Games building which is behind OBH. It was almost 6PM. The dim light in the atmosphere added to the beauty of the place. The ambience was awesome.

Mushroom or Santro Rock

Mushroom or Santro Rock

We had difficulties in climbing up but we finally managed it. The wind was awesome. We spent almost two hours there recollecting the happenings in past four years. Then we sang songs from 60s to present day 😀 It was an awesome feeling.

We at Mushroom Rock

Me

Nobody wanted to return but the hunger forced us to return. Don’t forget to take some eatables in case you plan to go there 🙂

08:50AM April 1st, 2009

Alarm!!! Ring Ring!!! I had a class at 8:30AM. But thinking that I’ll sleep for few more hours, opted to miss the class.

10:26AM April 1st, 2009

I was in deep sleep (went to bed at 5AM) when my mobile started ringing. I hate it when somebody calls me when I am sleeping. To my surprise it was a call from a faculty member. I took the call and received a congratulatory message. When I asked about the reason, he replied, “You sold videocache for $20000.” I got a thousand volt shock. Immediately all those bollywood flicks (Khosla Ka Ghosla etc.) came to my mind in which X sold property of Y to Z without Y even knowing about it. I totally lost my mind and couldn’t think of anything. He said a few lines after that and I just couldn’t hear him. I diverted the topic, said two-three sentences and hung up.

Woke up, had some water and switched on my monitor. Saw a message from Ankush Kalkote on Kopete saying, “Congrats yaar. ab to party deni hi padegi.”. In another tab Rishab Mukherjee saying congrats. I started believing it. I tried asking about the source of information but they wanted the god damn party desperately and didn’t really care what I was typing. I immediately openned cachevideos.com to check if somebody had hacked that. It was fine and there were no signs of any intrusions. In the meantime, Rishabh asked me to have a look at Rishi’s status message. It read, “Dollar Chacha (they call me so) has become a MILLIONAIRE. Sold videocache for $20000.” I kept browsing through the list and saw a lot of people changing their status message to the same. A few moments later I realized that its April 1 and everyone is trying to fool everyone else. Frustrated by the whole event, banged my head on the wall and went to sleep.

12:25PM April 1st, 2009

Mahaveer knocked my door asking for lunch. He didn’t know the truth. And fired all W questions (what, why, when, to whom) as soon as I openned the door. I switched on monitor and saw huge queue in Kopete. Everyone going crazy about videocache. People wondering about how can you sell a free software. WTF!!!! I immediately observed a huge potential in this venture. And put up my status as “@all it $21k and not $20k.” In the next five minutes almost 15-20 more people flooded me with queries about the sale.

Few sent congratulatory mails and few even came up to my room to congratulate. Sudden change in opinion of few people (who didn’t know the truth) around. e.g. “Studies are a total waste of time”, “I should have developed some god damn thing”, “Four years well wasted :(“, “Getting into a job is foolishness” etc…

Taking advantage of the situation, somebody sent a SMTP mail to UG4 which read,

Hello,

As most of you know, Google has bought VideoCache built by me in 20K $. I am really enthralled on this feat. Since, I wish to share my happiness with all of you, I have decided to give you a fantabulous party tonight in the ground just behind the Motorola. Alok n me are busy making arrangements for that. If someone wishes to help us in making the party more than a memorable one, just mail @ mksharma@students.iiit.ac.in
If you wish to visit the VideoCache website, click http://cachevideos.com

As you must have figured it out by now, I didn’t plan any of this. It was planned by few people as a side-effect of attending Indic class. If anyone was hurt, he/she should go and kick Sachin Goyal, Kapil Bajaj, Rishi Gupta, Ankush Kalkote, Ajay Somani.

As I said in my previous post, I was asked to visit Rediff Office in Mumbai. I thought Wednesday (25th) would be a great idea. Informed the same to HR. I got the return ticket to Mumbai on Tuesday. This was the first time I was going to Mumbai and also the first time I was boarding a flight. Both flights were Indian Airlines.

To Mumbai

Took Aero-Express from Hitech City to Airport. I was at airport (Shamshabad) at 6:15AM. Flight was a 7:50AM. So there was a lot of time that I could waste on the airport. With no idea how to proceed, I kept following a co-passenger (from the bus) and ended up in a queue for international flights 😛 Security redirected me to entrance for domestic flights. I proceeded to check in counters following a very simple approach. Look for counters with hot girls 😛 Among those, look for a counter with smallest number of people in the queue 😀 And it worked out of the box. Got the tickets. Moved in for security check. It was hassle free as I didn’t have any luggage. It was still an hour for the flight to take off. Used the free internet for few minutes. I was a bit nervous 🙂 About half an hour later, we were asked to proceed for boarding.

Ten minutes later, I was in plane. It was Airbus A320. Luckily I got the window seat. I was surprised as there was no in-flight entertainment system and the airbus looked technologically challenged 🙂 Few minutes later, the plane started crawling. It kept crawling at the same speed (20-30 km/hr) for so long that I got extremely frustrated. I was thinking, “Abe Mumbai paidal lekar jayega kya??” (Are we going to Mumbai by foot). I breathe a sigh of relief when it started accelerating. It was a thrilling experience after that long boredom. Things I imagined while playing NFS and other car games suddenly became live. We were on the ground at almost 300km/hr. The feeling while the plane takes off is damn nice. You feel something in the chest for sometime. After the plane is completely in air, things again become boring as the plane looks static with respect to ground. I was feeling like, “Why the hell its not moving??”. As the charm of flying for the first time was over, I picked up the newspaper. It was business line. Couldn’t really figure out a story to read. Then I picked the Air India magazine. While I was turning the pages, saw Katrina on sidebar of a page. Continued reading the story and figured out that both Airbus A319 and Airbus A321 have in flight entertainment systems. It was a real bad feeling to get stuck into A320 when both A319 and A321 were awesome 😐 The food served in breakfast was pretty good. Few minutes later, it was announced that we were in Mumbai. Landing in Mumbai was awesome. Actually, the planes first goes into the sea and then take a U turn. The landing experience was also awesome. It feels great when the plane decelerates.

To Rediff Office (Mahim)

I was warned by Sachin about the taxi drivers charging huge fare for no reasons. So I was a bit careful. But still ended up paying twice the actual charge. I left the airport at around 9:40AM. It was damn hot there at that time. My destination was Rediff office which is located somewhere in Mahim(West). Airport to Bandra (Western Express Highway) was totally jam packed. Taxi wallah turned out to be a bit smart and took the service root and managed to save a lot of time. Still it took almost an hour to reach the office.

In Rediff Office

I met Sumit in the office. He introduced me to a lot other people in NOC team. A small HR interview was conducted which was a surprising element for me as I never expected something like that. But it was fun talking to people from HR department. Then I met Sachin there. He introduced me to a lot other people related to domains I like. After that I had a small chit-chat session with managers from the NOC dept. After that Sachin introduced me to CTO, Rediff. We had a long chat session (almost half an hour). We talked about a lot of things in different domains (mainly open source). After that inspiring chat session, Sachin and me went out for lunch. I felt good to see good north Indian food nearby. We returned to office. Few minutes later, Sachin introduced me to CEO and CFO, Rediff. After that I had a long chat with Sachin about company environment and work culture.

Keeping in mind the traffic conditions, I left for the airport at 4:30PM. Unfortunately/fortunately I didn’t encounter any traffic and reached the airport at 5:00PM which was like 2 hours before the flight. To fight boredom, I headed over to Kingfisher check-in counters and found out a place to sit optimizing the view 😛

To Hyderabad

I was in plane at around 6:50PM. A321 looked really advanced as compared to A320. We were on the runway at scheduled time. But on the way it halted and waited there for another 20 minutes. By the time the plane took off, it was 25-30 minutes late. This time also I got the window seat. BTW plane was almost empty (only 40% of the seats were occupied). We were above sea in a few minutes. The view of the city in night from the sea was beyond my imagination. Every single light adding to the beauty of it. The view was best when the plane took a U turn. The entire Mumbai was visible and lights increased the beauty exponentially. The highways looked like long chains of light sources intersecting each other. It was a really wonderful experience. As we left Mumbai, the in-flight entertainment system was activated. I was browsing the channels and found one of them playing “Sorry Bhai”, one of my favorite pass-time bollywood flick. We reached Hyderabad at around 8:40PM. Took Aero-Express back to Gachibowli.

All in all it was an awesome trip to Rediff Office and also a wonderful first time flying experience 🙂

A few days back I got a call from an alumnus about a job opening at Rediff in my domain (server side craziness :P). Initially I was a bit surprised because I was not expecting something like that at all. After discussing a bit more about it, I returned to my room and forwarded the resume. Two days later while I was in RnD Showcase, I got a call from Rediff regarding the interview timings. It was scheduled on Saturday 21st at 1PM.

Saturday 21st

In the morning at around 9:40AM, I got a call from Sumit Rajwade (VP, Tech, Rediff) asking if interview can be conducted at 10:30AM. I replied positively. I got a bit nervous as I had to quickly arrange a place where we can meet. Arranged a conference room. At around 10:15AM, I got another call from Sumit saying that he was at coffee shop. I was deeply shocked. Coffee Shop :O I couldn’t really figure out what was going on. In my point of view, coffee shop is THE best place in IIIT Hyderabad. For me its a holy place 😛 When I reached coffee shop, I saw two guyz enjoying cold milk. Sumit said, “Whenever I come to IIIT, I always visit coffee shop. I can’t miss this cold milk”. I was still dumbstruck.

After brief introductions, interview started. He asked some NATing questions seeking answers at TCP level. I was able to answer those. Then we moved on to open source domain. Talked about Apache compression and keepalive for sometime. Then we moved on to squid and caching. I feel so good when somebody asks me something about caching/squid. Have been experimenting with caching/squid since last 1 year. Then we exchanged a few thoughts about our interests. Luckily there were no questions about printf statements. Then I briefed him about things I have been doing since last four years. After that he introduced me to the kind of work they are expecting from me. It looked pretty awesome and inspiring at the same time. Few more thoughts exchanged and it was all done. I was asked to take some time out to visit Rediff Head Office in Mumbai.

All in all, it was fun talking to Sumit. He has been hacking (here hacking means hacking and not cracking) open source softwares since years. Inspiring personality.

The most shocking thing to me was the coffee shop part of it. I never imagined that I’ll be interviewed at Coffee Shop.

Yesterday, as a part of our Photography Club Assignment we went for a PhotoWalk in Anand Buddha Vihar. We, a bunch of UG3 and UG4 students, reached Shenoy Nursing Home in Secunderabad in three groups where Sashidhar met us and guided us to Mahendra Hills. Our destination was a Buddhist Temple in Anand Buddha Vihar. We started walking. After walking about a kilometer, we reached a nice place. It was a small hill with flowers all over the place.

Near Mahendra Hills

Gaganpreet aka Bitgeek

Me

We walked further (about 1.5 kilometers) and reached the Buddhist Temple. It was closed at that time. People tried different type of photography with capturing whatever possible. The temple looked pretty beautiful from outside. We were eager to get in.

A view of the temple from the road

Buddhist Temple in Anand Buddha Vihar

At 4:00PM temple was opened for public. We got in and tried to capture as many objects as possible.

Deepak (A statue near the entrance)

Sashidhar, Aditya, Yogendra, Aakash, Me and Nitin

Shrikant got a bit sentimental and took picture of almost every leaf and flower 😛

Shrikant Nigam

Me inside the temple

Close Up

Woodwork on Doors

I tried goggles but they didn’t really go well with my looks 😛

Me

And finally Sashidhar who made this trip possible but eventually got bored.

Sashidhar

I was totally surprised by the beauty of the place. I was wondering why we never visited this beautiful place. After the photowalk, we had good food at McD, VikramPuri and returned home 😀

Its very easy to hop from one website to another with the help of a middle click while continuing with reading the current website especially when you have to follow the references. Browsing wikipedia is very easy when middle click work. But my mouse’s middle click is not working since last two weeks. I tried to open and check for any physical flaws but it didn’t help at all. I have a wireless mouse also which doesn’t work(i think because of power problems). I opened it to check if there the middle click logic is same and if there is some component which can be interchanged. But the middle click logic turned out to be really different.

In my last post about our trip, I described the scenario before I almost fell asleep. This is a continuation to the previous post and is a description of the journey. Please ignore language errors.

06:00AM February 27, 2009

I am sitting on a box. A huge stack of bags is placed next to me. Its height is almost equal to that of my shoulders (while I am sitting). I rest my head against the bags. I feel a bit better and now I am trying to sleep. I have covered myself with a piece of cloth. Only Somani is awake now. Next few minutes are as described by Mahaveer (who was sleeping in some other compartment, wakes up and comes to the place where we were sleeping).

Bhai (Kapil A) is sleeping in Somani’s lap. Somani’s face as usual looked like the face of some guy who was beaten all night by few cruel drunkers and left to die 😛 Still giving a strong fight to his laziness, Somani managed act in a manner that expressed his desire to play cards.

Mahaveer shouts in a loud voice, “WHAT THE FU**?? GUYZ, THIS PLACE IS HEAVEN. YOU LUCKY BITC**S”. I wake up with a shock and figure out that everybody was up and equally shocked. Later Mahaveer explained that Sambhav took him to some really fu**ed place where they were sleeping since last few hours. We all feeling a bit blessed (as if we were in first AC) . Few minutes later, Sambhav also joins us.

We (me and Sambhav) kicked Somani and Deepak out and went to sleep. Deepak who was sleeping till now, will take care of the luggage. It is a great feeling to have a place where you can actually sleep. Soon I fell asleep.

Checkout Somani in the video.

Mahaveer is not able to find a place to sleep and hence trying to frustrate Somani (which is the easiest thing to do) just for some fun 😛 After a lot of failed efforts, Mahaveer has decided to sleep while sitting against the door. But there is a fight even for that small place. Somani also wants to sleep. So, Mahaveer and Somani has decided to use the place to sleep on a time division basis with no overtime allowed under any circumstances.

Ajay Somani

We are now at Nagpur station. Everybody is overwhelmed to see the food that Kapil’s parents has brought for us. We are waiting for the train to start so that all of us can have the awesome food we have just got. A long horn and train starts slowly. Everybody settled. Bhai is serving the food to everyone following the Royal protocol. What an amazing food that was!!! Aaloo-poori, pulao, mithai, all Haldiram stuff from Nagpur and what not … The journey/miseries so far felt like nothing for that awesome food. Thanks a millions Bhai for the food.

After having that awesome lunch we started playing UNO. Sambhav and Kapil are sitting next to wash basin. As it is lunch time a lot of people are coming to wash their hands which is time and again troubling Sambhav. I am thinking of ideas to block the wash basin so that people will automatically prefer the washin in toilets but none of them is working. Now it has got interesting. Two girls (of age group 23-27) are here to wash their hands. First one washes her hands and returns with no trouble. Now its the time for the second girl to wash her hands. OMG she is having difficulties. Her second hand is not able to reach the tap while she is trying to fetch water with the other hand. I am observing every single moment hoping for something to happen. oh shit.. she managed to spill some water over Sambhav (a big fu**ing smile on my face forcing Sambhav to react to the incident). But before Sambhav could say something, the girl shouts, “Hat kar nahin baith sakte kya?? Log haath kaise dhoyenge yahaan??“. Rest of us overjoyed by the incident shouts at Sambhav in chorus, “Kaisa hai be… jab koi aaye to thoda hat ke baitha kar … kab se bol rahe hain tujhe ..“.

Playing UNO

We played UNO for hours. Almost till 5PM. It was damn hot and the hot air through the doors was killing. We reached Bhopal at 6:30PM. Now S10 and S9 was almost emty. Few of us went there and slept.

Thats it for today. The most dangerous part of the journey till Jaipur is still left. Wait till next post.

Thanks to Amarok and last.fm for keeping track of what I listen to. Music is on whenever I am in room irrespective of the mode I am in (sleeping or awake). I prefer desi Punjabi music over everything available. But if I am asked to pick one song that I’ll have to listen to for the rest of my life, it will be RUMORS by Lindsay Lohan. If you don’t believe me, just ask my wing-mates.

We (ten guyz : Me, Sachin, Mahaveer, Deepak, Kapil Bajaj, Kapil Royal Agrawal, Sambhav Jain, Nitin Gupta, Nitin Bansal, Ajay Somani) went on a trip to Vaishno Devi routed through Jaipur and Agra. I tried to write down my experiences while traveling. Actually we didn’t have confirmed tickets, so journey was a bit unusual. The content below is whatever I wrote in a copy in train. Ignore language errors.

04:03AM February 27, 2009

I am sitting on a huge box in a train while I am writing this. It seems a lot of things are happening for the first time. We, a group of crazy UG4 guyz, are on a way to a lot of destinations.

Two months ago, when I was at home, I got a call from Pankaj asking whether I want to join them for a trip to Jaipur, Vaishno Devi. I could not think of an answer at that time and replied positively without knowing the consequences. After considerable efforts, people booked round trip tickets from Hyderbad to Jaipur, Jaipur to Jammu and Jammu to Agra, Agra to Hyderbad which were followed by a lot of cancellation and re-reservations as few dropped out.

Seven of us left IIIT at 8:40PM on 26th to catch the Jaipur-Bangalore express at 2AM on 27th. We spent few hours on the station waiting for the train and killing time by playing card-games. BTW, we didn’t have even a single confirmed ticket. Everybody was hoping that we’ll have at least RAC by the time train arrives. Several attempts of buttering TTEs have already failed. The train arrived. We all rushed in to get some free space somewhere. Luckily I was able to find a huge space for 3-4 people. Me and Somani tried to capture as much space as possible by spreading our luggage as much as possible. After half an hour, Sachin declared that we won’t get any seat via any mechanism possible. This is the first time I am traveling without a confirmed ticket.

We at Kachiguda Station

Well, this is a first experience for Somani and Mahaveer as well. Right now we are in two groups of five and two. Mahaveer and Sambhav are in deep sleep on the floor of a compartment far away.

One of the elite members of a “Royal Family” is reading a book called “Stay Hungry Stay Foolish” while sitting on a bag placed in front of a toilet. I think you should not read a book with a title like that near a toilet.

Another well know personality, a well know coder, Ajay Somani, is sleeping while sitting on the floor beside the wash basin with a book in his hand. This guy had plans to fly to Jaipur instead of traveling by train.

Deepak, the guy who thinks every girl can be trapped, is, I think, in best position right now. He is in deep sleep beside Somani in a very comfortable situation.

Me (Black), Somani (Grey), Deepak (Strips)

Bhai, Somani, Me, Deepak

Sachin is sleeping (on the floor) in a very dangerous situation. Every time someone passes, I get the feeling that he/she may step on his face and I try to move things in mind to avoid the crash, but nothing seems to work here. His face is towards the walkway (corridor) and feet towards Somani and Deepak, three of them forming a 696 configuration. I think half an hour ago, Somani said, “Three heterosexual people can’t sleep in a space this small“. And as I write this they are sleeping. Draw your own conclusions.

This place is fu**ing stinky because of toilets. The writing (on paper) so far suggests that “FU**” is a word which is very easy to pronounce and type but extremely difficult to write on a paper. While typing your fingers automatically slips to type “FU**” in every other sentence.

On the other end of this compartment, I can see a huge number of people near the charging point (where people charge their mobiles). Looking at the crowd at that place at this late hour, it seems few people fu**ing board the train to fu**ing charge their mobiles.

Its 5:30AM now and we have crossed Kazipet. A few minutes ago, Somani enjoyed a cup of tea in front of toilet (the position where Bhai (Kapil A.) was sitting earlier).

In another event, I woke up Sachin. He successfully negotiated for a space for sitting with a person on SU birth. Now, he is trying to tease Somani. Also, Bhai is sleeping in Somani’s lap.

Now its 6:00AM. I have started feeling the hardness of the surface I am sitting on. Also, the effect of tea I had half an hour ago is fading away. It seems I want to sleep but there is no place to realize that dream 😛